McCloud

February 15, 2012

Ambling through the concrete canyons of New York in boots, cowboy hat, and string tie, Sam McCloud looked more than ridiculous. “What are you supposed to be, Midnight Cowboy?” somebody asks him in one episode. McCloud had a fish-out-of-water premise that might generously be called thin: a U.S. marshal from Taos, New Mexico, is reassigned to patrol the streets of Manhattan under some ill-defined information-exchange program, to the bemusement of Marshal McCloud and the perpetual aggravation of his bosses on the N.Y.P.D. It was a one-joke show – a joke that had, in fact, already been told once, in the movies – and probably the irresistible aw-shucks grin of Dennis Weaver, the affable actor who played McCloud, was the only thing that kept it from being a one-season show.

Weaver had been a character man for some two decades, in movies (he was the perverted motel clerk in Touch of Evil) but then famous as the jangly, limping deputy Chester Goode on Gunsmoke. Weaver won an Emmy as Chester and left the show in 1964, but evidently no one told him how inescapably Chester had typecast him as a sidekick and a hillbilly. In the movies he played supporting roles, and although they let him topline his own television shows now – Kentucky Jones and Gentle Ben – Weaver played second banana to children and/or animals in both of them.

The biographical details are important, because it leads one to wonder just whose idea it was to cast Weaver, that sexless not-quite-a-wimp gimp from Gunsmoke, in a quasi-official remake of the 1968 theatrical hit Coogan’s Bluff. Coogan’s Bluff is the movie in which Clint Eastwood captures a bad guy and leaves him handcuffed him to a porch rail while he goes inside to bathe in the nude with a pulchritudinous blonde. It’s built around Clint’s squint and delights in having the sexist pig Coogan be mean to everyone for no special reason. Even in the watered-down world of television, it’s a leap of logic from all of that to Chester “Muster Dillon!” Goode.

McCloud is watered down, but not as much as you might expect. It was designed not just to make a leading man out of Dennis Weaver, but also a ladies’ man. More lounge lizard than gila monster, Sam McCloud gets a lot of action: the show not only gives him a high-society girlfriend (Diana Muldaur) who appears and disappears, without much explanation, at the convenience of each week’s plot (or leading lady), but also parades in front of him an array of smitten policewomen (among them, in the first sex-, excuse me, six-episode season alone, Susan Saint James, Ann Prentiss, and an unbilled Teri Garr), upon each of whom McCloud hit with a semi-skeezy relentlessness.

Tall, slim, aggressive but better-mannered than the bluff Coogan, boasting a mischievous grin and a proto-Sam Elliott ’stache, Weaver was dead-on shrewd in his appoach to the part. Look at the early McCloud episodes, and you can tell that even though “romantic lead” was not in long supply on the nearly fifty year-old actor’s resume, Weaver understood exactly how to fashion himself into one. Crimes were committed on McCloud, and eventually Marshal Sam got around to solving them and eventually we shall examine a few here, but McCloud was a personality piece more than a genre exercise. I’ll bet that the audience for Weaver’s show, an audience that kept it on the air for seven seasons, was mostly female. For most of its run, McCloud alternated as the NBC Mystery Movie with Columbo and McMillan and Wife, the show that brought Rock Hudson to television; and if my guess about its audience demographic is correct, then one might see Columbo less as a tentpole holding up two lesser shows and more as the brainy outlier in a franchise built out of mustachioed man-candy.

Everything about McCloud apart from the character is unremarkable. The marshal has an NYPD sidekick/friend/babysitter, played by the handsome but dull Terry Carter. There’s an authority figure, Chief of Detectives Peter B. Clifford (J. D. Cannon), who gets bent out of shape by McCloud’s minor celebrity status and his intrusive, unorthodox policing methods. Their relationship is an echo of the establishment/maverick conflict that structured the first season of Mannix, in which the hero (Mike Connors) was an employee of a large corporate investigation firm, rather than the free agent he later became. Just as it did in Mannix, the idea fails because the McCloud-Clifford conflict remains static and unresolvable.

There was also a casting problem. In Coogan’s Bluff, the equivalent character (more plausibly, a lieutenant in charge of a single precinct) was played by Lee J. Cobb, whose world-weariness clashed effectively with Eastwood’s taciturn stubbornness. In the television series, J. D. Cannon played Chief Clifford, taking over for Peter Mark Richman, who played the character in the pilot telefilm. Cannon was a better actor than the humorless Richman, but he was all wrong to play against Weaver. An Idaho native, Cannon spoke in a harsh, raspy drawl. He had a rangy, western flavor, and a wolfish smirk that suggested he was up to something – just like Dennis Weaver. Weaver and Cannon were two Matt Dillons and no Chester. Imagine a stereotypical New Yorker type facing off against McCloud – someone like Cobb or Jack Warden or Val Avery – and you can picture how this tiring dead-weight grind could have come alive as an enjoyable weekly sparring match.

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McCloud went on the air under the stewardship of two Universal contractees: executive producer Leslie Stevens, on the downhill slide after losing the indie company that produced his creation, The Outer Limits; and Glen A. Larson, just beginning his ascendancy toward a peak as TV’s ultimate dreck magnate. The pair had launched It Takes a Thief two years earlier. The pilot telefilm (broadcast just as McCloud, but variously retitled for syndication) was credited to some talented paycheck-collectors, Stanford Whitmore (author of The Fugitive’s pilot) and Columbo creators Richard Levinson & William Link, but it was in fact a wholly uncredited rewrite of Coogan’s Bluff. A few key plot turns were inverted, but the feature film’s basic story – of a transported prisoner lost and then recaptured – was left intact.

The name of Herman Miller appears nowhere in the telefilm’s credits, but by the first season he is listed as the show’s creator. Miller was the original writer on Coogan’s Bluff and the restoration of his credit probably represented a heroic victory on the part of either the WGA or a good lawyer against Universal’s laissez-faire intellectual-property pickpocketing. So cheers to Miller, a relatively minor writer who presumably drafted the key elements of the character; but I’ll bet the talented writers who polished the Coogan’s Bluff script – Eastwood favorite Dean Riesner, Naked City guru Howard Rodman, and (uncredited) Ben Casey/Night Gallery producer Jack Laird – were a bit miffed at being left out of the McCloud bonanza.

Those are some big behind-the-scenes names, and I’ll throw around a few more. Douglas Heyes (Maverick, The Twilight Zone, The Bold Ones) wrote and directed the first episode broadcast. For the second season, Stevens and Larson were out, replaced by producer Dean Hargrove and associate producer Peter Allan Fields (both key Man From U.N.C.L.E. veterans), who wrote about half of the scripts. For the third year (which I haven’t watched yet), Larson was back, with Michael Gleason (Peyton Place, Remington Steele) in tow as his story editor. The paradox is, none of the staff changes mattered much. McCloud kept it in his pants more successfully the second year, Weaver got to sing (a corny, pro-ecology tune in “Give My Regrets to Broadway”), and that’s about it. McCloud remained a light show, without much grit or any kind of authorial touch.

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I enjoy McCloud, even as I’m not quite ready to contest its rep as a placeholder in between outings of Columbo. Columbo as Mozart, McCloud as Salieri, then. But even middling shows can turn out exceptional or off-beat episodes. That’s the fun of television; every week is a new chance, and compulsive viewing is rewarded with pleasant surprises.

The two early standouts are “A Little Plot at Tranquil Valley” and “Top of the World, Ma!” Fields’s “Tranquil Valley” is a black comedy that’s never very funny, but it has a better guest cast than a lot of the more celebrated cult movies from that era: Vic Morrow, Moses Gunn, Burgess Meredith, Allen Garfield, Joyce Van Patten, Lonny Chapman, Alfred Ryder, Arlene Martel, Bruce Kirby. Morrow and Gunn play an interracial, eccentric pair of kidnappers who shanghai McCloud to Liberty Island (the real thing; McCloud, like Kojak, intercut between the Universal backlot and some fabulous New York locations). I’m not the first person to perceive a possible influence of this episode on the central characters in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the existential hit men Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson).

“Tranquil Valley” is an oddity, but “Top of the World, Ma!” (also by Fields, from a story by actor Ray Danton) falls not too short of masterpiece territory. It’s the story of a violent country bumpkin (Bo Svenson) who comes to New York to avenge himself against some underworld types who have cheated him. Before it cops out completely in the last few minutes, “Top of the World, Ma!” has a real neon-noir tinge; the sweaty, skimpily dressed photographer’s model played by Stefanie Powers is a frankly coded prostitute and a formidable femme fatale. The episode maintains a genuine ambiguity as to who the real villain is; at a certain point, the hillbilly earns McCloud’s sympathy, but Svenson is so authentically terrifying that for once the cornpone crimefighter seems to have lost his mind. Pity the mob guys (more bountiful casting: Robert Webber, Val Avery, Vincent Gardenia) in Svenson’s sights; pity that McCloud couldn’t come up against this kind of opposition in every episode.

This is part of a fallwinter spring series looking at some of the many crime shows of the seventies. Next week: McCloud stars in a real-life detective story!

21 Responses to “McCloud”

I always loved Coogan’s Bluff, which I saw at the way-too-young age of six. The cueball-to-the-face scene had a huge impact on me.

As a kid, the idea of Coogan showing up on my TV every few weeks seemed too good to be true. Guess it was, since even at seven, McCloud seemed hopelessly diluted.

Years later, seeing it in late night local airings, I liked it a lot better, thanks largely to the great character actors who passed through it episode after episode. Timothy Carey’s in one somewhere along the way.

Tim Carey is in the same one as Dick Miller, although they do not, alas, have any scenes together.

Coogan’s Bluff does not really come off well today, I think, but I didn’t want to get sidetracked into that. Kind of a dry run for Dirty Harry, which addresses the issue of a “hero” who’s also a complete asshole a bit more shrewdly.

You’re right about Coogan today. The hippie scenes are pretty lame (as most of them are), and it does fall way short of what Siegel and Eastwood would do with Dirty Harry. But there was something about it I really dug as a kid.

How can you put Carey and Miller in an episode and not stick ‘em in a scene together? What a missed opportunity.

Hi Stephen,
Another great job on your part. I would add that in the later seasons of McCloud,evidence of smaller budgets is painfully apparent on screen.
The same shot of McCloud racing to the scene in a NYPD car is used over and over, even in the same episodes, scenes supposed to be in NYC have the tops of waving palm trees in the background, the Universal NYC set used so much that even as a kid my brothers delighted in pointing out the same storefronts used in the last episode.Plus some very clumsy editing. Still the series was always entertaining, with top notch guest stars – it launched John Denvers acting career, his “far out” line in one episode became in vogue among teens – and the rare episode with a big budget, the one set in Sydney, was a lot of fun.

After the first season under Dean Hargrove’s stewardship, Larson came in to run things and the show changed because Larson thought the humor of shows like Tranquil Valley didn’t fit. He saw the show more as a procedural with an unusual lead than a showcase for a quirky character.

When you mentioned actor J.D. Cannon’s role in McCloud, I remembered that he gained tv immortality playing Richard Kimble’s next door neighbor in the final episode of The Fugitive. Cannon’s character played a WW 2 veteran who witnessed Kimble’s wife’s killing by the one armed man but was too scared to intervene. This otherwise brave veteran’s cowardice symbolized post war doubt and elements of noir depression stemming from a second world war to end all wars that left those who fought feeling less than victorious despite some obvious reasons for battling the forces of fascism. As I remember, Cannon’s veteran then takes his own life. As for actor Peter Mark Richman’s humorlessness, he has done comedy. He played Suzanne Sommer’s father in Three’s Company, was in a humorous and ironic episode of the Twilight Zone (The Fear-episode#155) and has appeared in the comedies Naked Gun 2 1/2 and For Singles Only. I have met and corresponded with Mr Richman and I think he would disagree with the characterization that he is humorless. Thanks for letting me express these opinions.

I’m hoping someone here knows the answer to this, as it’s been bugging me for years.

There was a TV movie that had all the great detectives (Ironside, Starsky & Hutch, I think McMillan & wife, and a couple more) trying to track down a killer who was killing them off one by one in various odd ways. One was killed in a big laundry machine, Ironside had balloons attached to his wheelchair and flew off somewhere, etc. At the end, the killer was found and it turned out that everyone had actually escaped death somehow, and they showed us how. I can’t find any info about this TV movie.

I know that it’s NOT Murder Can Hurt You. This was a fairly serious movie, not a spoof.

As I said, it’s definitely not that one. For one thing, the killer in the one I’m talking about is disguised as a woman for the whole movie. And I’ve watched it on YouTube and it’s not the right movie.

Not to belabor the Murder Can Hurt You andwer, but…(Spoiler alert!!)
“Palumbo” is killed in a giant drain and rescued in a laundry machine; “Hatch” floats away on a giant balloon; “The Man in White” has several disguises including a well-proportioned madam, and ultimately turns out to be a woman, Mrs. Palumbo. Everyone escaped death and they show how in lengthy flashback sequences. The truth is it could only be done as a spoof because they could never have gotten the rights to do it otherwise. Parody is free, but usage is expensive and the shows involved came from both Universal and Columbia. Did you watch the entire thing on YouTube or just part?